Murder in the First Premiere Preview [SET VISIT INTERVIEWS] 

A stellar cast. A legendary creator. And the combination of two genres that have kept us entertained for years. Sign me up! These are just a few of the things you’ll get when Murder in the First premieres June 9th on TNT. We caught up with the stars of the new Steven Bochco series and we guarantee that this police procedural meets courtroom drama will keep you guessing until the very end.

Show Description:  Set in San Francisco, Murder in the First will follow a single case across an entire season. The series follows homicide detectives Terry English (Taye Diggs) and Hildy Mulligan (Kathleen Robertson) as they investigate two seemingly unrelated murders. The mystery deepens, however, when they find both murders have a common denominator in Silicon Valley wunderkind Erich Blunt (Tom Felton).

Not enough big names for you yet? The show also stars Steven Weber, James Cromwell, Tom Felton, Richard Schiff and Nicole Ari Parker, just to name a few. And unlike many cop dramas, this will not only follow the detectives in their work lives, it will also delve deep in to their personal lives, which is something that drew star Kathleen Robertson to the role:

Kathleen: I feel like we’ve seen a lot of shows about cops and we’ve seen this done before but usually they don’t delve in to the personal lives of what it really is to do the job. Especially for a woman doing the job and being a single mom and having the dichotomy between having to be exposed to the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of the world and then having to come home and be vulnerable and accessible to a 7 year old girl. That challenge really interested me and really made me go ‘that would be so difficult to have to maneuver through’.

Star Taye Diggs also admitted to loving the challenge, but he admitted to having a more prop-driven reason for wanting to return to a cop role.

Taye: My 3rd year in to [Private Practice], after I don’t know how many kisses and shirtless scenes, I was like, ‘I want to hold a gun again’. And I consider myself very lucky and fortunate I get to do it everyday.

While I’m sure many of the ladies out there wouldn’t mind seeing him shirtless AND holding a gun, they shouldn’t expect any such photos posted on instagram any time soon, as Diggs admitted that both he and his character are “willfully ignorant” when it comes to technology and social media.

Taye: I forget all my passwords. I haven’t opened my laptop in months. I’m awful. I can text, that’s it…but it does make it a little easier to play the character…I think some peoples minds are built for it and others, mine, just isn’t. I can’t remember how to do all of it. I still don’t get why there’s so much. I don’t know why its not just one, why there has to be twitter and instagram and facebook…its crazy.

Fortunately for Diggs, hunting down this elusive killer doesn’t leave much time for social media. The season-long murder mystery is introduced in the pilot and promises to keep us guessing, which according to Weber, is all part of the plan.

Steven: We all try to to inject a few little idiosyncratic touches that should it turn out to be, one of us, it will all make sense. So at any given point, somebody will make some sort of indicative twitch or something that will point to possible guilt.

And while we know that actors are often sworn to secrecy and threatened with poor lighting if they tell, we genuinely believed this crew when they told us that even they were baffled by the killer’s identity.

Tom: I picked away at Steven and Eric to try to get more information and they’ve remained tight lipped throughout, really, I know just as little now. Each episode is a new education in to the character and the stories and certainly went different ways that I was expecting, which makes it a little bit nerve wracking at first but ultimately more exciting, I think.

Steven: By design, every week, the ship goes in a different direction and throws me off all the time and for what I think of [my character]. ‘I’m it, i’m it, oh, I can’t possibly be it now.’ But also Steven [Bochco] and Eric [Lodal] are extremely smart. They’ve been around a long time, Steven certainly, so he also has a pretty natural sense about what audiences know and like and I think their challenge is to be a step ahead of a now very fast and almost immediately gratified public.

And apparently that’s exactly why TNT jumped at the project.

Richard Schiff: All I know is that I talked to a network exec at TNT….they said when they were pitched this show, when they were talking about this show, when they got to the end and saw who the killer was they were like ‘holy shit, let’s get this show’.

You’re probably more likely to get struck by lightening than hear that kind of response at the end of a pitch meeting so while I’d rather avoid thunderstorms, I’ll definitely be tuning in.

 Murder in the First premieres June 9th at 10/9c on TNT.

Murder in the First Promo